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I Have A Secret Goal With My Editor - He Has Asthma And Uses His Inhaler, And After I Send Him A New Manuscript, I'll Have His Assistant Phone Me And Tell Me How Many Times He Had To Get His Inhaler Out While Reading A Draft. It's My Secret Laugh Meter.

-Chuck Palahniuk

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I Have A Secret

Chuck Palahniuk

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I Have A Secret Goal With My Editor - He Has Asthma And Uses His Inhaler, And After I Send Him A New Manuscript, I'll Have His Assistant Phone Me And Tell Me How Many Times He Had To Get His Inhaler Out While Reading A Draft. It's My Secret Laugh Meter.

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A Shadow Of A Reflection Of An Image Of An Illusion.

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We All Have This Moment, When Your Folks First See You As Someone Not Growing Up To Be Them.

You Realize You Have No Control Over How You're Perceived.

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You Have To Keep Recycling Yourself.

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Mylife Might Be Little And Boring, But At Least It’s Mine - Not Some Assembly-line, Secondhand, Hand-me-down Life.

All Major Publishing Houses Have These Big Fat Biographies Sitting There, Waiting For People To Die. All You Have To Do Is Slap On The End And Put In On The Market. It's That Kind Of Commoditization And Completion Of Your Life Before You Die - And This Kind Of Imposition Of A Public Idea Of Self That Replaces The Actual Living Self - That I Find So Frightening.

Publishing House

No Fear. No Distractions. The Ability To Let That Which Does Not Matter Truly Slide.

Just For The Record, She Still Loves You. She Wouldn't Bother To Torture You If She Didn't.

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I Am An Invisible Monster, And I Am Incapable Of Loving Anybody. You Don't Know Which Is Worse.

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With My Eyes Closed, I Ask If She Knows How This Will All Turn Out. "long-term Or Short-term?" She Asks. Both. "long-term," She Says, "we're All Going To Die. Then Our Bodies Will Rot. No Surprise There. Short-term, We're Going To Live Happily Ever After." Really? "really," She Says. "so Don't Sweat It.

Give Me Lust, Baby. Flash. Give Me Malice. Flash. Give Me Detached Existentialist Ennui. Flash. Give Me Rampant Intellectualism As A Coping Mechanism. Flash.

Coping Mechanisms

I Tiger Can Smile A Snake Will Say It Loves You Lies Make Us Evil

I Spent My Life Attacking Everything Because I Was Too Afraid To Risk Creating Anything.

I Figure If Eve Could Get Us Into This Mess, I Could Get Us Out. After All, God Really Likes To See A Go-getter.

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I Still Love Him So Much I'll Hide Any Amount Of Conjugated Estrogen In His Food. So Much I'll Do Anything To Destroy Him.

I Still Love Him

My Writing Process Isn't A Very Organized Thing. The Actual Writing Part Is A Tiny Part Of My Life. I Often Write In Public. I Bring My Laptop Or Write Freehand In Notebooks. Then, I'll Read Through Them While I Exercise Or Walk The Dog. The Very Last Thing I Do Is The Sitting Alone At The Computer Part.

His Saliva Tasted Like The Wet Dicks Of Ten Thousand Lonely Truck Drivers.

Am I Sleeping? Have I Slept At All? This Is Insomnia.

If Emotion Can Create A Physical Action, Then Duplicating The Physical Action Can Re-create The Emotion.

For Years Now, I've Wanted To Fall Asleep. The Sort Of Slipping Off, The Giving Up, The Falling Part Of Sleep. Now Sleeping Is The Last Thing I Want To Do.

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I Can Become Someone Else, Not Out Of Pressure And Desperation, But Merely Because A New Life Sounds Fun Or Interesting Or Joyful.

Hello! Look At Me. Hello! I Am So Zen. This Is Blood. This Is Nothing. Hello. Everything Is Nothing, And It's So Cool To Be Enlightened. Like Me.

Hope Is Something Really Tough And Tenacious You Have To Give Up. It’s An Addiction To Break.

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A Male Chauvinist Pig Isn't Born, He's Made, And More And More Of Them Are Being Made By Women.

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Worst Nightmares

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Sex Pretty Much Cures Everything.

Find Value In What We've Been Taught Is Worthless.

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Greatest Treasure

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To Hell With Housework, Our Top Priority Has Always Been Between Our Legs.

Funerals Are All Abstract Ceremony.

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If You Died Right Now, How Would You Feel About Your Life?

He Was The Kind Of Boy Any Young Girl Should Date While She's Still Able To Recover.

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Men Are Destroyed For Being Rebellious, And Women Destroy Themselves By Failing To Be Rebellious. Unless You Can Make That Next Jump To Either Getting Along With People Or Resisting People, You Are Ultimately Destroying Yourself.

I Suppose It’s Comfort, Perhaps A Sense Of Self-control, Doing Worse Things To Yourself Than The World Will Ever Dare Inflict.

I Want To Find Something Else, Unknowable, Some Place That's Not On The Map. A Real Adventure.

Where Every Day Doesn't Start With An Alarm Clock And End With The Television.

You Can Only Hold A Smile For So Long, After That It's Just Teeth.

I Know So Many Writers Who Are A Hundred Times Better Than Me And Have Longer, Greater Ideas Than Mine, But They Gave Up; They Stopped. The Biggest Talent You Can Have Is Determination.

There's A Terrible Dark Joy When The Only Person Who Knows All Your Secrets Is Finally Dead.

When You're An Addict, You Can Go Without Feeling Anything Except Drunk Or Stoned Or Hungry. Still, When You Compare This To Other Feelings, To Sadness, Anger, Fear, Worry, Despair, And Depression, Well, An Addiction No Longer Looks So Bad. It Looks Like A Very Viable Option.

The Answer Is There Is No Answer.

The Truth Is, Immigrants Tend To Be More American Than People Born Here.

They Assume She Was Once Gorgeously Beautiful. Because Now She Looks So—bad.

I Didn't Use Anybody's Story. I Used The Context And The Structure Of The Situation. People Were So, So Desperate To Tell Their Story And Begin To Digest Their Experience - Like Turning It Into A Story - That After The Fist Few Weeks I Could Go With A Pad And Pencil And Take Notes. People Didn't Seem At All Bothered By That.

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We've Been Speaking English As A Second Language So Long That We've Forgotten It As Our First.

If You Worry About Disaster All The Time, That's What You're Going To Get.

If You Make People Laugh Too Much, Their Blood Becomes - I Believe It Is Acidic As Opposed To Alkaline. It Changes The Oxygen Level In The Blood, And People Are Likelier To Pass Out At That Point.

She's Not Wearing Makeup So Her Face Just Looks Like Skin.

I Don't Remember The Hotel Rooms Or The Airports But I Always Remember The Events.

Demon Or Angel Or Evil Spirit, I Just Need Something To Show Itself. Ghoulie Or Ghosty Or Long-legged Beastie, I Just Want My Hand Held.

I Will Never Write A Sequel To Anything That I Will Ever Write.

All God Does Is Watch Us And Kill Us When We Get Boring. We Must Never, Ever Be Boring.

Skin, Bones, Blood And Organs Transplant From Person To Person. Even What’s Inside You Already, The Colonies Of Microbes And Bugs That Eat Your Food For You, Without Them You’d Die. Nothing Of You Is All-the-way Yours. All Of You Is Inherited. Whatever You’re Thinking, A Million Other Folks Are Thinking. Whatever You Do, They’re Doing, And None Of You Is Responsible. All Of You Is A Cooperative Effort.

According To Plato, We Don't Learn Anything. Our Soul Has Lived So Many Lives That We Know Everything. Teachers And Education Can Only Remind Us Of What We Already Know.

Because Everything Up To Now Is A Story And Everything After Now Is A Story.

You Know How They Say You Only Hurt The Ones You Love? Well, It Works Both Ways.

Everyone's In Their Own Personal Coma.

Everybody Looks A Little Crazy If You're Looking Close Enough And If You Can't Look That Close, Then You Don't Really Love Them.

When We Don't Know Who To Hate, We Hate Ourselves.

When Did The Future Switch From Being A Promise To A Threat?

I Wanted To Destroy Everything Beautiful I'd Never Have. Burn The Amazon Rain Forests. Pump Chlorofluorocarbons Straight Up To Gobble The Ozone. Open The Dump Valves On Supertankers And Uncap Offshore Oil Wells. I Wanted To Kill All The Fish I Couldn't Afford To Eat, And Smother The French Beaches I'd Never See. I Wanted The Whole World To Hit Bottom.

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I Am Jack's Smirking Revenge.

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Where Would Jesus Be If No One Had Written The Gospels?

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This Is The Biggest Mistake I Could Think Would Save Me. I Wanted To Give Up The Idea That I Had Any Control. Shake Things Up. To Be Saved By Chaos. To See If I Could Cope, I Wanted To Force Myself To Grow Again. To Explode My Comfort Zone.

I Always Thought I'd Write When I Retired - When I Turned 65. But By The Time I Was 33, To Tell You The Truth, I Was A Little Bored With Drugs And Sex, And I Thought I'd Do The Writing Thing.

This Is The Greatest Momemt Of Your Life And Your Out Missing It

But If You Tell Folks You're A College Student, Folks Are So Impressed. You Can Be A Student In Anything And Not Have To Know Anything. Just Say Toxicology Or Marine Biokinesis, And The Person You're Talking To Will Change The Subject To Himself. If This Doesn't Work, Mention The Neural Synapses Of Embryonic Pigeons.

You Buy Furniture. You Tell Yourself, This Is The Last Sofa I Will Ever Need In My Life. Buy The Sofa, Then For A Couple Years You're Satisfied That No Matter What Goes Wrong, At Least You've Got Your Sofa Issue Handled. Then The Right Set Of Dishes. Then The Perfect Bed. The Drapes. The Rug. Then You're Trapped In Your Lovely Nest, And The Things You Used To Own, Now They Own You.

In The Big Factory Of Perfecting Human Souls, The Earth Was Kind Of Tumbler. The Sale As The Kind People Use To Polish Rocks. All Souls Come Here To Rub The Sharp Edges Off Each Other. This Isn't Suffering. It's Erosion.

We Opened Our Hearts. Hear Me, Heal Me, Save Me, Believe Me.

The Trick To Forgetting The Big Picture Is To Look At Everything Close-up.

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Charles Baudelaire

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